Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, says he wasn’t surprised that Donald Trump won the election: “People were angry at what they called the government – the ‘swamp.'” Inefficient government. That people wanted policies that were more growth and business-friendly, that they didn’t want to be constantly lectured about social policy. This is the social superiority way or the highway.’ I traveled all over the country; I felt it everywhere.

I asked, “There is a gloomy mood about the economy. Do you understand that?”

“I understand it because I think there are a lot of legitimate concerns that Americans have. For example, they are angry about an ineffective government. They are angry about immigration. There are people with legitimate problems.”

Although unemployment has fallen, inflation has calmed and stock prices have risen sharply, even he says he is “cautiously pessimistic” about the economy. And as the head of America’s largest bank, what Dimon has to say about things matters.

Listen to him on Bitcoin, which he calls “a pyramid scheme” and “as useless as a pet rock”: “At some point we will have some kind of digital currency. I’m not against crypto. Do you know?”, Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value. It is widely used by sex traffickers, money launderers and ransomware. I applaud your ability to buy or sell the right to smoke, but I don’t believe you should smoke!”

Since he took the helm of the bank 20 years ago, the company has doubled its workforce to 320,000 and increased its assets by nearly $3 trillion. Which would probably surprise his grandparents, who came to the United States from Greece in the early 20th century with little money.

Dimon spent much of his childhood in an apartment building in a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, where he shared a room with his two brothers. When Dimon revisited the street where he grew up, he remarked, “I broke my arm on that jungle gym over there.”

I asked, “As a child, did you ever dream that in a million years you would be running one of the largest banks in the world?”

“No,” he replied. “My father was a stockbroker. So I was sometimes conscious about that part of the world. But I had never met a CEO until I was in college or something.”

He became one of the most successful CEOs in the country, processing $10 trillion a day.

His bench is thriving and healthy, but Dimon, now 68, has had two major health problems. The first was throat cancer a decade ago.

He says it’s in remission: “But I know a little more,” he said. “People who have been told they have cancer know a little more than other people. That’s staring you right in the face and it can actually happen. You become a little more conscious, a little more thoughtful. You don’t want to have that. “Remorse.”

He also had a heart attack in March 2020, at the start of COVID. “My heart, I mean, the pain was extraordinary. I thought I heard it tear. It was an aortic dissection. I had a ruptured aorta.” He was told he might not make it.

I asked, “You know, when you have surgery, at least in your head you think, ‘I’ve lived the life I should have lived so far’?”

“Yes. Not enough of that, but yeah,” Dimon laughed.

He woke up after seven or eight hours on the operating table: “The doctor told me I was one of the few people he had ever seen who woke up like that straight after surgery. I waved to my children who had been sitting there the whole time.” . And then I slept in the intensive care unit again.

“I mean, when you wake up in the ICU, when you’re a man who’s never really depended on other people, and suddenly you have tubes everywhere and you can’t do anything yourself, and you know, you have tubes in your heart and Tubes in your lungs and tubes in your carotid artery…”

He was in the hospital a week, back at work a month later and was soon traveling around the world, something he says he does 40 percent of his time.

We met him in the executive suite on the 43rd floor of the bank’s Manhattan headquarters. From there, he can see where he grew up — and to the left, the shiny new JPMorgan headquarters next door, nearly twice as tall and which he says will be taller than the Empire State Building.

With all the big things he’s involved in, it’s interesting that Dimon is particularly proud of opening branches in lower-income and underserved communities across the country. While visiting a branch in Harlem, he noted, “Mortgage documentation is really difficult. At one of these church branches, a man stood up and said he had finally bought a house he had lived in for 30 years. He He said there was no way he could have gotten that mortgage if one of our mortgage officers hadn’t called him every day for months to make him feel comfortable and pick up the forms. And it worked.”

This is not a nonprofit organization; These local branches make money for the bank.

But what about the other end of the spectrum? Asked about the increasing wealth of the very rich and what might be “unhinged” with the system, Dimon replied: “I think you have to be very careful and say, ‘What’s gone wrong?’ They want a healthy economy, and a truly healthy economy helps all Americans Grow the economy Some of that wealth should be repaired.

“But I don’t hear you saying, ‘There’s something wrong with these billionaires growing like poppies.’ I mean, what is that? The tax laws?

“If I were king for a day, I would probably also change a number of tax laws, which I won’t give you details of. It won’t reduce as much as you seem to think it should be reduced.”

“No. But I’m interested that you don’t say, ‘That’s wrong. This isn’t working.’”

“I think the wrong part is that the bottom 30% didn’t do better, not that the top 0.1% did as well.”

“Why not?”

“There may be no connection between them. What we need to do to fix the problem for everyone…”

“But you didn’t say what was going on at the other end?”

“I don’t know what’s going on on the other end,” Dimon replied.

Dimon himself is a billionaire. We asked him about the richest person in the world, Elon Musk. “He’s clearly an exceptional talent,” Dimon said. “I mean, when I look at Tesla and SpaceX, yeah, well, we should make government more efficient. Is this the right way? I don’t know it. Do I want them to succeed? In any case.”

“But it is strange that such a wealthy man, with so many important companies that are important to our economy and even our national security, should now somehow suggest that he can influence right-wing politics in Europe. That doesn’t sound right,” does it?”

Dimon said: “I am not responsible for his behavior, so let him do it. But if you say it’s weird, then it’s not that weird. This kind of thing has been happening in this country for a long time. If you go back to Lindbergh, there was more interference in transatlantic politics than meets the eye.”

“Does this bother you?”

“NO.”

“Are you okay with it?”

“Take it easy.”

“Someone called him an oligarch, an American oligarch.”

“Yes, that’s insults.”

Dimon has been in banking for more than 40 years, which leads to the inevitable question: When will he retire? “The last time I was asked, I said less than five years. But if you say retire, I won’t retire like that. Maybe I’ll write a book. I might teach. I might work with my kids if they do. I would never pressure them to work with me.

“I didn’t hear you say, ‘Maybe I’ll become chairman and, you know, just give up the CEO role.'”

“Oh, that’s likely. That’s probably what will happen. That’s also up to the board, not me. But if it makes sense, I might chair it for a few years.”

He says he doesn’t know who his successor might be. But he knows one thing: “I love my job. I love what he does. I like our people. It motivates me. Like many others, I am exhausted on Friday. I want to go home, that’s what I want.” My martini and go to sleep! But I love my job, having a meaning in life.

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The story was produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Ed Givnish.